The notion that Israel is victimizing the Palestinians is one of the
cardinal—perhaps the cardinal—paradigms of international politics
since the 1967 Six-Day War. Not only the left, both in Israel and
abroad, subscribes to it, but also a large part of the U.S. foreign
policy establishment, and just about all of official Europe. It goes
without saying that the paradigm is regnant in the Arab and Muslim
worlds.

It is hard, then, to get anyone interested in Palestinians
victimizing Palestinians—suggesting that the seeming preoccupation
with Israeli-ruled territories has something to do with the great
value many people find in the Jew-as-victimizer prototype. Similarly,
once the United States—supposedly the oppressor—had left Southeast
Asia in the early 1970s, it was hard to get any but a few of the
opponents of that presence interested in the ensuing horrendous
victimization of Vietnamese and Cambodians by other Vietnamese and
Cambodians.

Last week, though, an Israeli outfit called the Jerusalem Institute
of Justice (JIJ) tried to buck the trend. It presented to the
European Parliament a report on “The Status of Human Rights on the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” The reports notes that “a surprising
silence prevails regarding the violation of human rights by the
Palestinian government authorities in the Territories,” and that,
even though these are by now widely documented, “the EU continues to
push for full and immediate statehood for the [Palestinian
Authority].”

And while the JIJ focuses mainly on Europe, it could, naturally, also
have said similar things regarding the Obama administration’s
preoccupation with getting statehood for the Palestinians—fast; which
seems to have waned only recently in an election year.

In a short section called “Arbitrary Imprisonment,” the JIJ relates
that in 2011 the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR)
received

complaints of more than 1,400 arbitrary arrests in the West Bank and
more than 300 in Gaza.

Although most of the cases were and are connected to the conflict
between Fatah and Hamas, there were also many cases of political
arrests of reporters, teachers, university professors, students,
Mosque Imams and other persons who opposed the reigning government.

Apparently, then, removing most (or in Gaza, all) Israeli
governmental control from these areas is not a sine qua non for
liberation. But it gets much worse in the report’s next
section, “Torture and Degrading Treatment.” It turns out that human
rights workers say “cases of torture and cruel punishment occur on a
regular basis in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, often
resulting in death.”

For instance, in the West Bank on September 19, 2010,

Ahmed Salhab, a 42-year-old mechanic from Hebron, was arrested and
detained until October 16, first in Hebron and then in Jericho. On
October 16, Preventive Security officials transferred him to a
hospital in Hebron suffering from injury to previously torn spinal
discs and severe mental distress resulting from torture in custody.

And in Gaza in 2010,

the ICHR documented 220 complaints on the use of cruel or degrading
punishment of prisoners, which included standing for many hours,
flogging, beating with batons, kicking, punching, tying the hands
behind the back and hanging with a hook in high place, blindfolding
for many hours, using electric shock by tying the toes with
electrified wires, cursing and threatening.

Naturally, in such a situation, the West Bank and Gaza don’t score
high in other categories of human rights either, such as:

-Freedom of the press: In 2010 Reporters without Borders rated the PA
150th out of 170 countries in that category. In the first half of
2011 there were “68 cases of assault on reporters by the Palestinian
security forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

-Freedom of religion: The U.S. State Department has ranked the
PA “44th out of 50 countries in regard to persecution or
discrimination against religious minorities.” The Open Doors
organization says “Christians in the West Bank are exposed to
discrimination and suffer limitations of their freedom.” Regarding
Gaza, reports speak of “systematic persecution with the purpose of
continual decrease in the number of Christians living there.”

-Women’s rights: While the JIJ says that “Palestinian women in the
West Bank generally have much more freedom than those living in other
Arab countries,” honor killings are an ongoing reality
and “Palestinian law allows those who are murdered based on family
honor to evade justice and provides quasi-impunity regarding [these]
killings.” Women also are “not legally protected against domestic
violence,” and “the Islamic law makes it difficult for women to
divorce…women have to prove that they were beaten and this is almost
impossible….” For women in Gaza, “socializing in public with the
opposite sex is forbidden, and premarital sex is punishable by
imprisonment.”

Children’s rights: In February 2011 a Palestinian newspaper reported
that in the Palestinian territories many parents do not know how to
treat children who are mentally or physically disabled. These
children are mostly hidden from the eyes of society and are isolated,
even from their siblings. They are often sexually abused by their
relatives or neighbors. Their disability is perceived as a form of a
punishment from Allah and as a source of shame for the parents….

Last September in his speech to the UN General Assembly, President
Obama—seemingly oblivious to these problems—said he believed
that “the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own.” He wasn’t
the only one; his predecessor, President George W. Bush, called for
a “democratic Palestinian state” on many occasions, and the “Middle
East Road Map to Peace,” drafted by the State Department based on a
speech Bush gave in 2002, mentions such a democratic state four times
while harping on the theme of a “democratic Palestinian constitution.”

But talking about Palestinian—and Arab—democracy has always been
easier than achieving it. Hopes for democratizing the region ran high
at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and as recently as
last year when the “Arab Spring” broke out. A year later, facing a
dark landscape of Islamist ascendancy and/or severe brutality in
Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Iraq, and so on, such hopes have again
run aground.